Season 2, Episode 65 : April Sotomayor

Will: (00:08) Welcome back to the Green Element podcast where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I’m your host, Will Richardson and I can’t wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability.

Will: (00:28) April, welcome to the Green Element podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. You work for a company called Investors in the Environments. You’re a certification company that’s helps organizations become more environmental. Please do let us know more about what it is that you guys are up to.

April: (00:45) Okay, great. Thank you for having me on, Will. Investors in the Environment was set up about 10 years ago in 2010 after…were set up by an environmental charity called PECT. So, PECT run sustainability initiatives nationally, but we are based in Peterborough, that’s where we started. So, our name, PECT stands for Peterborough Environment City Trust but as we’ve grown as an organization, we’ve grown an impact and we’ve grown regionally and nationally and throughout our work with businesses, schools and communities, really target engaging people with meaningful environmental action and also connecting with the natural environment in a number of ways. I work on the business team and so I lead on the national accreditation scheme, investors and the environment. It was set up because we identified a gap in the market for organizations that weren’t able to implement ISO 14,001 because of cost, because of time, because of understanding and training and ability and capability.

April: (01:49) So, with regard to small to medium enterprises, you know, ISO 14,001, for many, is not possible at least to get certification. So I was set up to help engage that sort of sector. According to UK government, about over 90% of businesses in the UK are SMEs. So, it’s a huge market really to get people involved with impactful initiatives with regard to energy, waste and a number of other resources, but not only that, making environmental change and sustainability something that is understandable within people’s individual job roles, whatever that might be, whether they are already sustainability professionals. So, if they’re in a role that’s specifically, you know, if they’d been recruited because they’ve got environmental management skills, for example, there’s still an opportunity to tell those sustainability stories, which we see larger organizations that do have a professional in place, they usually struggle to kind of talk about that journey and what it means and how other staff be into that.

April: (03:02) But then for other businesses that are, you know, doing things from anything from health care to veterinary, to solicitors, accountants, installers of different technologies, construction, etc. All of these guys that usually struggle to find the extra time to document and implement a certified environmental management. But that’s where we come in. We provide some basic training and knowledge about what to do. We do sort of a gap analysis, but you don’t really talk about it in those terms. It’s just what are you doing environmentally? What aren’t you doing? What can you do next based on the type of business that you have? So, for example, if you’re a solicitor and you’re primarily office based, we look at the typical impacts. Things like your energy consumption. Paper use is a really big one with solicitors and we start to help them introduce actions that will make them more efficient. And then the other side to that is to get their staff to actively engage with environmental initiatives outside of the business, whether that’s tree planting or volunteering with local community groups, but seeing the wider context of sustainability. That it’s not just kind of what’s in front of you. It’s much more beyond that.

Will: (04:21) Having interviews you, people that have gone through invests in the environments they hold you in very high regard with what they’ve learned and how they have gone through the process because with ISO 14,000 mine you’d have the process and then you have someone else certify you from a view cast point of view that you guys consultancy going through and then do you certify that yourselves or how does that all work?

April: (04:47) Really good question. So, Investors in the environment is a supported accreditation. So, people sign up, we give them the tools and the support to implement things like an environmental policy, start to use some other tools on how to measure and monitor their resources, et cetera, and usually what happens is over the course of a year is when they start implementing things. By the end of that year, ideally they’ll be able to achieve the first accreditation and that is through one of our assessors. So, it is internal. It’s not an externally verify, but we do have very clear criteria on what a business has to do to meet that and which is very transparent and and I think businesses really appreciate that as well. So you know, I’m trained to ISO 14,001 in 2015 and so when I first came to this scheme, I wasn’t quite sure how that would work but for a lot of SMEs, for example, it isn’t necessarily the external certification that is the most important thing. It’s the actual work and that’s, we stand by that and we stand by the integrity of our system and it works for a lot of organization.

Will (05:54) I can see that having been in the industry long enough, I can totally see why it would work and I think people would get scared off by a bit of the ISO 14,001 and some of the ISO certifications because of, I guess, they probably put them into, oh only big businesses do, do that kind of certification. And you’ve got a process that’s on your website that takes you through the environmental policy and it’s actually, it’s a really, really good website, how you can go through the process and you’re based all over the…England, aren’t you. Are you based in Scotland?

April: (06:32) We don’t have any representation in Scotland at the moment, but we do have members throughout UK. For those that are further afield, they, some of our localities, because we, we operate with delivery partners across regions in the UK and so we have stronger representation in some regions than others. So, with regard to the membership that mainly applies to frequency of meeting or event. For some of the events that we might host, for example, we have quite a lot of events happening in Nottingham in northeast and the east region, but fewer events that we lead on elsewhere, in which case we run other events through partners and through promotion and then the, the site audits obviously then we have to travel out if they’re further away from us that we do, we do support across.

Will: (07:23) Brilliant. I’m based in Scotland, so I guess that why I was asking because I was on the website, [Inaudible 07:28] Scottish.

April: (07:30) It’s really interesting because delivery partners that we work with, they usually have some kind of consultancy in addition to running Investors in the Environment. So, they will operate on an Investors in the Environment licence alongside their other business and it helps them add value to what they’re doing already with [Inaudible 07:48].

Will: (07:48) There you go. Anyone who’s in Scotland who wants to add value to their business, sign up and talk to April, I guess.

April: (07:56) Yeah, absolutely.

Will: (07:59) What would you say your business superpowers was?

April: (08:03) Our business superpower is engaging in a very practical, on the ground way. We know our customers. We have a really good relationship with our members. We have regular contact with them, which helps us understand their business. We collaborate with them. So, it’s not just, you know, we do an assessment or an audit, environmental audit and say, okay, you’re doing this, that and the other wrong. Here’s the list of corrective actions needed. We do a bit of that but then we say, we can help you by, here’s this tool for example, you need to really look at some kind of compliance or legal, have a legal registered, for example. This is how you go about doing that. Perhaps in house they don’t have that [Inaudible 08:54] knowledge. So, we work with them to develop that. Also signpost them to other services or resources that could help support that.

April: (09:03) But other things like the community links. So, being run by an environmental charity, we already operate quite strongly across a whole host of other sustainability areas. So, we’ve got strong contacts schools. We, we run, PECT runs, an ECO charter, which is a national scheme for schools to make environmental improvements to the school and with the kids and trying to add, you know, environmental projects into their curriculum alongside the curriculum. So it’s not something extra teachers have to do, but making it so it’s not just a bunch of tick boxes. Again, I think having that grassroots origin also helps us to get people to tell their stories and that’s, for me, I think one of the most important things right now about becoming a more sustainable society is people talking about what they’re doing, talking about where they’re struggling, talking about what maybe hasn’t worked so well and, but what really has worked well or what small things that they can do.

April: (10:08) So we are promoting, there’s a national zero waste week happening the first week of September and we’ve developed a lot of resources to help our membership run campaigns around zero waste week. Whether that’s doing waste audits or doing, you know, print free day or having an office lunch to reduce packaging brought into the office. But the whole thing is just doing something, taking some kind of action. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be something and then once the business gets going, putting forth a small action, there’s a snowball effect. They get excited, they feel energized by it, they get excellent feedback, their business enjoys improved reputation and then they want to do more and they get quite excited about what they can do next. As far as business superpower, I think that’s one of the things is that that connection.

Will: (11:02) Brilliant. What got you into the environmental world? And what’s your background and where you, you’re clearly not British. Well unless you picked up your accent from watching movies. I don’t know. What’s your story and how did you come into the environmental world?

April: (11:20) Well, back in school, I had an amazing teacher that took us out. He was our biology teacher and he would take us out to our local river and we would do water quality samplings. We would sample some of the invertebrates to test the quality of the water. And I absolutely loved that. I found that so interesting. I later entered a different career field. I was a linguist and an analyst and I always wanted to do, go back to science. So, as I was leaving that field, I was looking for what to do and I joined the Sierra Club, which is a US organization that promotes the national environment and protecting the natural environment and they had a number of links on their website and I followed one of them for a training. It was like a citizen science training for water quality, which is something, you know, what I had done at school. And long story short, I became a certified assessor. I started leading groups in some different water waste, doing water waste cleanups as well, city water waste up? And then it just kind of grew from there. And I always wanted to, I thought eventually I would work in policy, environmental policy but I found that working directly with organizations and seeing changes and making those connections was really powerful, which is what drew me to PECTC. So, I’ve been at PECT for about five years now and I just find that quite impactful and I find that what you can do on a local level can be rich, like big changes

Will: (12:56) [Inaudible 12:56] in the environmental world in the UK and you, I would imagine you go back to North America to visit family and stuff. I mean, is there a fundamental difference between the two because you see an awful lot of environmental realism, I guess but stuff going on environmentally in the US and Canada, that’s not necessarily reported on but when you’re in the industry you understand what is going on. Where do you see two? Because you must see a difference or you may not see a different side. I don’t know.

April: (13:27) What do you mean? Like politically or on the ground?

Will: (13:30) No, forget about the current president. I’m not, I’m honestly not. I’m just curious because what I’ve noticed is different cultures have different things going on environmentally and also at different drivers. I mean, you see this within Europe with Germany and with France and we’ve all picked up. So, Germany was very, very, very quick to pick up on waste and to recycle, reduce and ensure that the waste within Germany was sorted out. I mean, they were doing in the 80s and they have good recycling schemes there which in the UK we were so far behind on that kind of front, but we’re quite ahead on energy and I’m just wondering what differences you see between North America and the UK and whether you’ve picked up on anything that’s going on in the US and that isn’t going on over here. Just more out curiosity really.

April: (14:21) Yeah, it is. I mean it’s different. The US is huge in comparison. I grew up in California and there’s a really strong culture of environmentalism there. For example, you know, recycling has never, you know, my…I’ve never not recycled. It’s always been really important. It’s always been, you know, you’re recycling, you segregate it. To such an extent that you know, when I was growing up in California, I, me and my brothers to make some extra cash would go to our neighbors, knocking on our neighbor’s doors, asking for their cans and then we would take them to the recycling center and get money for it. Is was a little enterprise for us. So, that had value and you just, I think, you know, I grew up having a lot of contact with the outdoors as well. So I think that’s really important and that gets you to value the environment, which is obviously why it’s so important to get people connecting with nature so that they feel it’s important to protect it. But as far as the differences, it’s difficult because I really developed here from an environmental student sustainability professional, not there as having a different career when I lived there but it seems like similar things are happening, but each state in the US is very different on how it’s run. So while California is quite advanced, there are some that aren’t. So it’s, it’s tricky. Yeah, I do read up on it. I do look at what’s happening there. You know, recently, you know how people are looking at offsetting their carbon emissions and, yeah, it’s just, it’s just massively different, Will. It’s really hard to compare I think without having the data. Yeah.

Will: (16:06) Yeah. I love that. I think it’s, I mean it’s the, it’s the renewable, say for example, what’s going on in Texas with renewables and how progressive they are with renewables with a history in oil and they’ve completely flipped to being massive renewable state. And I love it. I just, I love, you can even tell. I used to live in the US and I love, I actually really enjoy the u s and I think it was so much positive stuff that comes out of that and I just get, I get really annoyed when people go, yeah, this was really bad to do. Well actually, why don’t focus on the good stuff that’s happening? Don’t necessarily only focus on the bad stuff because actually, you know…

April: (16:44) 100% and you know, I think our next real thing as people working in sustainability is helping people see what a future, what a sustainable future looks like and I think there’s a real lack of vision in that area. There’s still a lot of stuff happening. There are positive things happening, but there is quite a lot of negative press and you know, the shocking climate science out there is right. And you know, talking about that side of things. But we have to know, as human beings, we have to know what we need to be working towards and we have to be able to see what we’re working towards and I think that’s kind of our role maybe is helping people in businesses helping whomever we’re working with see what can be achieved and what that would look like in the future.

Will: (17:31) Yeah, I think that, yeah, I totally agree in that. It’s that cohesiveness and so that’s one of the reasons why we set up this podcast was for exactly that, to understand what was, what is going on around and to learn from each other and to not concentrate on the bad. I remember having a talk with a friend of mine who’s a journalist back in 2004, 2005 and she’d just written and ask them about how wind turbines were bad for birds. They were really, you know, basically the whole article was saying how bad winds turbines were and it was around about 2005 there were quite a lot of articles about that and it was because most people saw wind turbines as a whole as good things. So the newspapers were going, well, if that’s the case, then if we write loads of bad stuff, then they’ll buy our newspapers.

Will: (18:23) I was just, I don’t know, I got really. I actually got really kind of upset with the whole thing. I mean, because that’s not going to help us environmentally and mitigate climate change and reduce our environmental impact if all we can do is concentrates on all the negative stuff that’s going on. It just doesn’t make sense to me, which is why I love what you guys doing and listening to you and what you’re doing at Investors in Environments because your, so much crowdsourcing is in it and pulling stuff together so that everyone learns off each other and you’ve got a system that people can go through because not everyone goes through one. We don’t all think the same, you know, we don’t all go through that one particular way and your way will fit a number of people and that way will fit a number of people and so that therefore you’ve got all these different people ultimately serving the same goal and reducing your environmental organizations. Environmental impact.

April: (19:22) Yeah, absolutely.

Will (19:25) How do you engage your suppliers and customers and staff with environments and managements?

April: (19:31) You mean current members or prospective members?

Will: (19:34) I guess, in this instance it would be, I’m probably more focused on members because it’d be interesting to know how you engage that messaging and across,

April: (19:44) Well we have our core criteria are, you know, environmental policy, looking at what the organization is doing and their policy will have to be robust enough that we can follow it through their business operations into how they’re measuring and managing the resources. We help them to set targets against resources. So, using them efficiently, so reducing and wherever possible, you know, business is growing, making sure that it, you know, per person or per pound spent, that that resource is being used responsibly. And then we have, in terms of engagement, the most engaging aspect is through environmental park projects, which are part of the backbone of our criteria. So, to get green level you have to engage with at least three environmental projects and we have a matrix that we help businesses to use to help them plan their projects and understand significance and they follow three key areas which are resource efficiency. So for example, you know, doing led replacement project, you know, getting some quotes in or getting some grant funding in and you know, overhauling your LED or your lighting system, which can have quite a significant carbon reduction effect. And then another element would be doing habitat or conservation projects, projects that support biodiversity and enhancement of the natural environment. So that could be carbon offsetting, it could be getting your staff out for tree planting days, could be setting aside some land for biodiversity, whether that’s that like a wildflower meadow for example. If a business has a patch of land, they could plant some wild flowers on. And then the last element is sort of social, community and wellbeing project. So, those areas, you know, help a business start to look inward, look at how they’re treating their workers, looking at, you know, obviously if you are trying to protect the environment and feel compassion toward the environment, it’s natural for you to feel compassion towards those working for you and with you.

April: (21:50) So projects in that area. It could be anything from, you know, having staff lunches. One of our businesses I was working with this week, they subsidize massages for their staff, I think monthly on a Friday, they had someone come in and they can get, you know, book in a subsidized massage during the lunch break. Little things like that or looking at, you know, their family friendly policies or any number of things. It’s, it’s not prescriptive, but we look, help them kind of frame it in this way so that they can see, you know, within the scope of their business. You know, if it’s a very small business, they’re not going to have the resources necessarily to invest in like some of the bigger projects or bigger things. But they can probably treat their workers better or look at ways to improve and so that that counts as well. And so each year they have to improve against all of these criteria and you have to be able to demonstrate on the resources data-driven so they measure the resources and so we can see, yes there’s been at least 2% [Inaudible 22:54] and now we’ll start looking at science based targets for carbon especially. And then looking at sort of feedbacks that they’re running projects in the community. What feedback has, has there been from that, what’s the scale? So if it’s a bigger business, we would want to see that scaled to kind of the scope of, of what that business is able to achieve. Kind of helping to lead them on that and provide some guidance.So that, those are sort of the primary engagement areas. And actually there’s one more I haven’t mentioned, which is the communication so that both internal and external. So, I mentioned it before, it’s so important for them to talk about their journey, you know, absolutely brilliant for, you know, facilities management to get all their resources running and taking over very efficiently. Their building management system is working really well, but they have to get everybody in both involved, involve every layer in something. If it’s not in resource efficiency then they can do it in some of those other areas like the environmental protection or the wellbeing or community aspect of things. So, by telling those stories, both through whether it’s newsletters or through team meetings or toolbox talks to, you know, trans people out on a site to telling that story on their website and on social media is so important. And with small businesses in particular, a lot of them don’t take advantage of that as much because, you know, everybody’s so busy. Everybody’s busy the, but in order to influence and change the culture and make some real changes, talking about those, those journeys is really, really important.

Will: (24:36)

Brilliant. It sounds like [Inaudible 24:28] way of going through and so knowing 14,001 is much more about kind of this is the structure and there’s no that you’ve actually got practical points that you expect people to go through, which knowing what we do is, would be very useful and very, very helpful.

Will: (24:57) Yeah.

April: (24:58) That’s really cool.

April: (24:59) Absolutely. I mean we don’t want environmental management to be a barrier because you’re trying to follow a rigid framework. So, one of the things, like with the monitoring of resources, we look carefully at what the business does. If it’s not…if they’re not able to monitor something initially, fine, we’ll move on for that. We’ll set that aside for now. We’ll start doing what we can and get you on that ladder to improvement but I think getting that, getting those first key actions in, it needs to happen or it might not happen. You see what I mean? So there’s a barrier. We’re trying to remove barriers to enable people to actually move forward with some really important changes.

Will: (25:38) April, how do we learn more about you guys and where can we…well, all the links will be on the website but how can we learn more about what it is that you guys do?

April: (25:47) Sure. So our website is www.ie. dot uk.com. We’re on social media, on Facebook. Goodness me. I think it /investors in the environment, on Twitter, we’re @iieuk. Yeah. You can follow us on this split places. We’re pretty active. We’d like to shout out about our members as well when they’ve been doing good things. We’ve got a green directory for our members at some elect to go on. Some offer member to member discounts, for example, some of their services. But yeah, we also have an IEE mentor scheme. So, we connect our members to each other so they can have those conversations that are quite important. Like how did you do this? How did you manage to do that? Because we run events, but businesses are busy doing the business that they’re in so often they can’t get away from work to come to a non-work-related event.

April: (26:38) So that’s why we came up with our mentor scheme. So we make introductions between members. So, obviously, myself and other advisors within the team, will be working closely with businesses and they’ll, they’ll understand, oh, you’ve got a problem that I’ve seen this other business solve in a really interesting way. And then we’ll say, you know, between them, are you happy for us to make an introduction? You guys can have a chat about how it went and we can give them sort of the cliff notes. But having that conversation and having that networking capability is really important. You can find out about that by, by emailing us and we can give you some more details. But we also run, we promote some national events as well and we have a variety of campaigns and resources that we promote. So, you can find all the on our social media as well. You can find out, if you’re interested and you go to our website, you can sign up to our newsletter and that will keep you posted on upcoming happening.

Will: (27:32) Great. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you for letting us know how Investors in Environments, what it is that you guys are doing and hopefully on the back of this people will go, hmmm, that sounds really interesting. I want to become more environmental. I’m going to go onto your website and sign up. So thank you for teaching us.

April: (27:51) Thanks very much, Will.

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Will: (27:55)Thank you so much for listening to the end of this episode of the green element podcast. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. I’d love to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation? What are you going to do differently? Please share your thoughts across social media and tag us so we can see them too @ge_podcast. For links and show notes for this episode, visit our website, greenelement.co.uk/podcast. Thank you again. I hope you’ll join me on the next episode and together we can help create a better world.

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